Thursday, June 21, 2012

You believe firmly in all leftist dogmas. You are convinced that you possess a superior intelligence. You have written a
television show that glorifies leftist dogmas, putting them in the mouth of a
blowhard broadcaster who reminds people of Keith Olberman.

You expect to be showered with plaudits from television
critics... for your brilliance, your audacity, and the utter correctness of your
opinions.

At the least, you assume that the liberal media will cut you
some slack. After all, you are doing God's word, indoctrinating the
ignorant masses in leftists pieties.

But then, on Monday, as posted here, The New Yorker’s television critic Emily Nussbaum did not just pan
your show. She trashed it to within an inch of its life.

It was an inauspicious start.

Then yesterday, Maureen Ryan weighed in on the Huffington Post. She echoed Nussbaum’s views.

In Ryan’s words:

The
biggest problem with "The Newsroom" -- and it's one of many, many
problems -- is that its goals and its narrative strategies are in direct
conflict with each other. The result is a dramatically inert, infuriating mess,
one that wastes a fine cast to no demonstrable purpose, unless you consider
giving Sorkin yet another platform in which to Set the People Straight is a
worthwhile purpose.

She continued:

Everything
about it is overblown or undercooked to the point of being laughable; a
palpable and occasionally comical cognitive dissonance arose between the
admiration the swelling soundtrack told me I was supposed to feel and the buzzing annoyance I actually felt
during the four episodes I watched. Even aesthetically, the whole thing feels
off: The cinematography in Will's airless newsroom is pallid and clumsy, and
the interactions of the characters feel flat and contrived.

And then:

A show
in which paper-thin characters spend so much time congratulating themselves for
"speaking truth to stupid" is always going to have an uphill climb in
the hearts and minds of viewers used to more subtle delights, but when
"The Newsroom" isn't obvious and self-congratulatory, it's
manipulative and shrieky.

Apparently, Ryan did not like the show.

But, what about Washington
Post television critic, Hank Stuever? Yesterday he offered his less-than-favorable
review. In a slap to Sorkin he found the writing especially bad.

In Stuever’s words:

The
word pile that once seemed so melodious in Sorkin’s other projects — especially
that millennial anti-anxiety medication known as the “The
West Wing” — now has the effect of tinnitus. The men talk like Sorkin
writes; the women talk that way, too; the 28-year-olds talk like that, as do
the 41-year-olds, as do the cast’s septuagenarians, who include Sam Waterston
as the head of the network news division and, later on, Jane Fonda as the
network owner who puts the arch in matriarch. (In other words, Jane Fonda as
Ted Turner.)

In case you missed the point, he added:

Characters
never stop speechifying to one another, replacing believable dialogue with that
unmistakably Sorkinesque logorrhea of righteous self-importance. It’s a puppet
show with Sorkin as the only hand, expressing his displeasure with the tenor of
public discourse. (Which everyone knows has reached an unctuous low.)

Of course, the show’s first episode had not yet aired.
Still, it does not look good for Wunderkind
Aaron Sorkin.